"NUG" 2007 Obituary

NUGENT o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2007-08-24 published
WILSON,
GailPatricia
Peacefully, at the Grey Bruce Regional Health Services in Owen
Sound. Surrounded by the love of her family on Monday, August
20th, 2007. Gail Patricia
WILSON of Owen Sound. Loving mother
of Patricia
CORNACCHIA and husband Rocco, of Pickering, Deborah
HARVEY, and her husband Robert, Angela
McGREGOR, and her husband
Jim, both of Owen Sound. Sadly missed by her grandchildren, her
Friends, and her children's father, Joe
NUGENTSr.Predeceased
by their son, Michael
NUGENT. A private family service has been
held at the St. Stanislaus cemetery, in Chatsworth. If so desired
the family would appreciate donations to the Jim Millman Memorial
Trust Fund and may be made through the Brian E. Wood Funeral
Home, 250 - 14th Street West, Owen Sound (519-376-7492).

NUGENT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-09-22 published
Socialite's Brazilian Carnival Ball raised millions for Toronto
charities
Using organizational skills and strategy worthy of a Bay Street
Chief Executive Officer, she transformed a church-basement affair
into the social event of the season, writes Sandra
MARTIN
By Sandra MARTIN,
PageS11
Italian and Brazilian in ancestry, Anna Maria DE
SOUZA heated
up the staid fundraising climate in Toronto with the Brazilian
Carnival Ball, probably the most significant philanthropic gala
on the Canadian social calendar. A warm-blooded, energetic outsider,
she had the entrepreneurial zeal, organizing skills and shrewd
ambition of a self-made Chief Executive Officer. But, instead
of starting a company or a launching a hedge fund, she camouflaged
those skills under the patina of a society hostess. Using old-fashioned
influence, rather than naked power, she forged alliances with
charitable foundations in campaigns that raised their profiles,
her status, and close to $45-million for Toronto hospitals, universities
and arts and culture organizations over the past 40 years.
For all her flamboyance, Ms. DE
SOUZA was intensely private.
Nobody knew her real age - not even her husband Ivan, as she
loved to boast. "I've known her for 35 years and it never occurred
to me to wonder," said her friend Catherine
NUGENT. "
She was
one of those people who was ageless."
Along with Ms. DE
SOUZA's success came complaints about her management
style. She seemed unapologetic to criticisms that she was territorial
and a micro-manager who autocratically chose the event's annual
beneficiary. "This is big business, and the organization requires
that we have a good board to sell the ball, a recipient who will
pay for our computers, our secretarial staff," she told Maclean's
last year. "This work requires a huge infrastructure." And even
knowing how much work was involved, if Ms. DE
SOUZA asked if
you wanted to be the beneficiary of the Brazilian Carnival Ball,
"there was absolutely no reason to say no," said Paul
ALOFS,
president of the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation "because
it is such a massive fundraising and awareness-generating opportunity
for a not-for-profit."
Although the ball was her biggest activity, it wasn't her only
one. She also volunteered on the women's committee of the Canadian
Opera Company and was the curator of the Henry Birks Antique
Collection of Silver in the late 1970s. A passionate gardener
and a keen tennis player, she loved to entertain and to cook
for her guests. "She was the most generous, vivacious person
I know," said Ms.
NUGENT. "
She loved to introduce people to each
other and to grow her circle of Friends, but she was also shy."
Anna Maria DE
SOUZA, the daughter of Amadeu
GUIDI and his wife
Honorica (née
MARCOLLINI,) was born in Sao Sebastiao de Parasio
in the mountainous state of Minas Geras in the interior of Brazil.
She grew up in a family of four brothers and one sister. Her
grandfather on her mother's side had immigrated from Genoa, Italy,
as a teenager and found a job as a construction worker building
homes for plantation workers, according to Rosemary Sexton in
The Glitter Girls, Charity and Vanity: Chronicles of an Age of
Excess.
When money was scarce, her grandfather was paid in land. Eventually
he accumulated enough acreage to start his own plantation and
enough wealth to take his family back to Genoa on a trip. There,
he bought a villa. For the rest of his life he spent half the
year in Italy and the other in Brazil. When his daughter, Honorica,
married, Mr.
MARCOLLINI handed over control of his Brazilian
plantation to her new husband, Amadeu. That's where his granddaughter,
Anna Maria, grew up, in what she later compared to paradise.
It was a time in which life "was gracious and slow and everything
was looked after." She was educated at the Collegio Paula Frassinette
in Brazil where she earned a teaching degree, and then attended
the Escola Técnica de Comercio C.A.
At 18, she married William John
GRIFFITHS, an English mining
engineer for Wimpey Construction, a British firm that had a contract
to build a dam in Brazil. Anna Maria went into labour with their
first child on Good Friday, a holiday in Brazil. Her doctor was
away, the birth was arduous and afterward Anna Maria was unable
to bear more children. The baby, a daughter, lived for only 23 days.
To compound the tragedy, her husband died in a work-related accident
10 months later.
Widowed, and still in her teens, Anna Maria went to live with
her grandmother in Italy where she attended finishing school.
Afterward, sailing back to Brazil on a cruise ship, she met a
Brazilian plantation owner who urged her to get involved in the
coffee exporting business. As chance would have it, at a party
in Rio de Janeiro on New Year's Eve in 1964, Anna Maria met a
man named John
MARSTON, who said he imported bulk foods into
Canada. If she had products to sell, he was interested in seeing
them.
With an insouciant entrepreneurship, she gathered some samples
from the family coffee plantation and set out for Canada, arriving
in Toronto in gloomiest February, 1965. She looked up Mr.
MARSTON
and married him three months later in a Protestant ceremony,
which her mother, a Catholic, boycotted. "I fell in love with
Toronto and the only thing I could do to stay was to get married,"
she once confided. By 1974, the
MARSTONs had divorced, Anna Maria
complaining later that her husband was a workaholic who had little
interest in married life.
Anna Maria had long since found ways to make her own life more
interesting. Homesickness propelled her "to kill the longing"
by organizing her first Brazilian Ball in 1966, the winter after
she arrived in Canada, in a church basement at Dundas and Grace
Streets, a largely Portuguese area of Toronto. Tickets cost $5,
the food for the 50 guests was prepared by Anna Maria and her
Friends, and the aim was merely to cover costs and bring a little
Mardi Gras colour to the dreary Toronto winter. The ball quickly
became a tradition.
By the early 1970s, the ball, which had quickly moved above ground
to the Sutton Place Hotel and then the Sheraton Centre, was making
a small profit, with the proceeds going to a Brazilian orphanage.
That tradition has continued with five per cent of the annual
profits benefiting leper colonies, old age homes and other causes
in or around her hometown. When Toronto charities began asking
if they could reap the ball's annual largesse, Anna Maria astutely
decided to bestow the fundraising benefits on a different cause
every time, thereby hooking into a fresh network and set of volunteers
annually.
Krystyne GRIFFIN attended her first Brazilian Ball in 1977, the
year she left Paris, married businessman and Griffin Poetry Prize
founder and benefactor Scott
GRIFFIN, and moved to Toronto. "Everybody
told me this was the party to go to because it showed that Toronto
could be fun." They were correct. "A guy in drag dressed like
Queen Alexandra walked up and smacked Scott right on the lips.
That was my introduction to Anna Maria's parties," said Ms.
GRIFFIN.
"I liked her without knowing her well."
The ball celebrated its 14th anniversary in 1980 at the Four
Seasons Hotel on Avenue Road in Toronto and netted $50,000. That's
where it stayed until 1988, when it moved to the yawning depths
of the Metro Toronto Convention Hotel, the only venue that could
accommodate crowds upward of 1,000.
Disaffected by her globe-trotting, work-obsessed husband, Anna
Maria met the late Montagu Black at the Brazilian Carnival Ball
in the early 1970s, and he thought she should meet his younger
brother, Conrad, who was then plying his way as an aspiring tycoon
and researching his biography of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis.
Eventually, lawyer Igor Kaplan introduced them and they dated
for about two years after her 1974 divorce. "She was a delightful,
refreshing, and enterprising person, and was a very popular and
respected person in a community where she started as a stranger
and, at first, hardly spoke the language," Conrad Black wrote
in an e-mail message yesterday. "I saw her a lot at the time
my parents died, 10 days apart, in 1976, and she could not have
been more supportive."
AnnaMaria's lasting love, however, was businessman Ivan DE
SOUZA.
Introduced by Marvelle
KOFFLER, wife of Murray
KOFFLER of Shoppers
Drug Mart, they had much in common, both being Portuguese-speaking
and Catholic. They were married on December 22, 1982, and were
devoted to each other.
More than the venue of the ball changed over the years. As it
became more lavish and raised more money (much of it matched
by government programs with costs underwritten by corporate sponsors),
so, too, did the entertainment. Instead of handmade decorations
on a carnival theme, Ms. DE
SOUZA began importing carnival dancers
from Brazil. That meant switching the date from Mardi Gras (the
carnival on the eve of Lent, the 40-day period of penance preceding
Easter in the Catholic calendar) to April or May so that the
dancers could travel to Toronto in their off-season.
At the 40th anniversary of the ball in 2006, the $2-million in
net proceeds went to York University's Accolade Project and the
1,600 guests were entertained by a 30-minute samba parade from
the Rio Carnival - including 50 dancers in feathered, beaded
and bejewelled costumes processing on foot or on wooden horses
- to the beat of the batucada rhythm supplied by the Cocktail
Brazil Band.
LastNovember,Ms. DE
SOUZA was diagnosed with rampaging cancer
and underwent rigorous treatment that included chemotherapy at
Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. She looked frail, but
valiant, at the 2007 ball, which was held April 21 and raised
$2.6-million net for the Arthritis and Autoimmunity Research
Centre in Toronto. "She and the ball were a brand, and for a
very small organization like us, she had a tremendous impact.
She did a great job," said Gerri Grant, executive director of
the AARC.
About a month ago, Ms. DE
SOUZA went back into hospital for more
treatment, but was well enough to decide that oncology nursing,
through the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, should be
the focus and the beneficiary of the 2008 Brazilian ball - the
first one that will occur without her dominant presence.
Anna Maria DE
SOUZA was born in Brazil, probably in 1941. She
died in Toronto on September 18, 2007. She was in her mid-60s.
She is survived by her third husband, Ivan DE
SOUZA, her step-son
John, and her extended family.